We know that fake billionaire Donald Trump has enough fake cash to be able to afford one fake painting by Renoir. A fake painting like that might go for as much as seventy-eight million fake dollars. That’s a lot of fake cash! But what about two fake paintings? Does a fake billionaire have enough fake money to afford two fake Renoirs?
That is our mystery.
You are probably aware that Trump claims to own a painting by Renoir called Two Sisters (on the Terrace). The painting is currently displayed in his Trump Tower home. Trump told his biographer that it was a real Renoir. His biographer happened to be acquainted with the actual painting.
He told Trump that the original was in the Art Institute of Chicago. Trump said, no, his was the original. Although this may be overkill, I found a book entitled Master Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago and took some pictures of it.
PROOF OF LIES
As you can see in figures A and B, the book specifically describes the painting Trump claims to own. There’s a picture of it. It is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. The Art Institute became the owner of that painting before Trump was born. That’s the end of the story, right?
It would be if we didn’t have a very sick president. You see, there’s a second Renoir, and it has similar provenance issues.
THE SECOND RENOIR
And by “similar provenance issues,” I mean that the original doesn’t belong to Donald Trump. Much like his faked Time covers, and the fake diamond cuff links he gifts to people, all of his supposed artwork appears to be fake.
Trump had many opportunites to buy valuable original Art. Like the time he agreed to have Andy Warhol paint Trump Tower, then when Warhol created eight silk screens to choose from, Trump reneged.
Trump somehow managed to screw up what would have been his best investment! A couple of months ago, a simple doodle of Trump Tower by Warhol sold at auction for $32,500.00. What would eight paintings sell for? If you look at the highest prices paid for Art, Warhol figures prominently on the list, with two that fetched over $100m, and five others that earned at least $69.6m. While managing to lose money owning casinos, Trump avoided an excellent investment in original Art.
With that in mind, let’s get back to the second “Renoir.”
Below is a picture of Melania’s office in Trump Tower. As you can see, there are a number of glitzy items. One of those items is supposedly Renoir’s La Loge (or The Theater Box). Is it a real Renoir?
Of course not.
The second sentence of the wikipedia entry for the painting notes that “[i]t is part of the collection at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.”
The Courtauld Institute has a massive collection of Impressionists: Two paintings by Van Gogh, including his famous bandaged-ear self-portrait, along with twelve paintings by Cézanne, six by Degas, three by Monet and four by Renoir, one of which is La Loge. Moreover, the Courtauld Institute has the temerity to advertise its ownership of the actual painting on its website.
I had hoped that this was my discovery, but it seems that other Art lovers have noticed it as well. In a bolded section above the main article, Business Insider provides this:
Donald Trump also once claimed that he has the original Renoir painting “La Loge” in New York City. This has since been disproven [sic], considering that the portrait is on display in London’s Courtland [sic] Art Institute.
The Business Insider article cites a New York Post blurb that described Trump’s La Loge painting as “probably a skillfully painted copy.” Far be it for me to defend Trump, but I will defend truth. Nowhere in these articles is there proof that Trump claimed La Loge was an original Renoir. There is, however, indirect proof. The Post writer claimed that the Trump La Loge was likely a “reproduction,” and he asked for, but did not receive, comment from Trump. That, I guess, is some evidence.
On the other hand, do I believe that Trump has claimed the painting is an original? Yes. I believe he has probably told hundreds of people that it is an original Renoir.
A DAILY KOS EXCLUSIVE: PROOF THAT TRUMP’S LA LOGE IS A FAKE
Trump has obviously fooled the Art writer for The Federalist, an archly conservative online magazine. This writer claimed that it is possible that Trump did buy another authentic version of La Loge when it was sold to an unidentified buyer at auction in 2008. She also attacked the writer of the Post article:
Johnson’s sneer, too, is not what it seems. His use of the conditional is telling. Is it likely that a New York Post gossip columnist has a steady eye for the Real Thing? … If timing matters, what Johnson calls “probably a skillfully painted copy” of Renoir’s “La Loge” in Melania’s office might well be genuine. The original sold at Sotheby’s for close to $10 million to an unidentified buyer in 2008. By then, Donald and Melania had been married three years. A Renoir would have been a lovely present for the current Trumpess.
Here is the online catalog listing for the painting at Sotheby’s 2008 auction. If you go to that page, you will see the dimensions of the painting. I have provided a screengrab for your convenience. As you can see, this second version of La Loge is tiny. It measures about 11 x 8 inches. The average size of a male’s hand is 7.44 inches.
To provide you with additional perspective, I have highlighted the Trump La Loge in juxtaposition to Melania’s Apple laptop below. As you can see, the laptop is much smaller than the painting, even though it is closer to the camera lens.
So, it seems, the Art writer for The Federalist didn’t do basic fact-checking. Trump’s La Loge cannot be the original full-size painting because that is hanging in the Courtauld Institute. It cannot be the smaller version because Trump’s version is much too large.
The painting is a certain fake.
WHY RENOIR?
Trump has a thing for Versailles. He had the interior of his Trump Tower penthouse modeled after that famous French palace. To maintain the French connection—and I doubt it goes much deeper than that—and to showcase Art that depicted beauty and elegance and grace, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a natural choice. Unlike Monet, for example, Renoir was well known for painting beautiful women. Edgar Degas, though French and a painter of beautiful women, also had a name that looked Spanish.
I believe it doesn’t go much deeper than that.
One thing is certain: If Trump really understood Pierre-Auguste Renoir, he probably wouldn’t hang (fake) Renoir paintings on his walls.
“Some people call his work ‘sweet,’ but [Renoir] felt that there was enough unhappiness in the world without our adding to it,” ... “He tried to raise money to create the first day care center for working women in Paris. He loved children and women.”
WHY PAINTINGS?
Remember, my friends, the first time that we know Trump lied about a famous Renoir was on his airplane. The Renoir reproduction was hanging inside of it. I think that that coincidence explains quite a bit. Planes can be leased. They can be purchased on the installment plan. You can use a plane while still paying for it. Lots of bankrupt or near-bankrupt airlines own planes. In fact, Trump’s own airline defaulted on its debts in 1990. On the other hand, paintings by Renoir have to be paid for with cash, tens of millions of dollars of the stuff, within a few hours after the hammer comes down at auction.
I believe this also explains the psychology of many wealthy people who own Art.
A plane can provide you with transportation. It affords you travel options and comfort. You can deduct your plane as a business expense. It is a tool. A work of Art, in the hands of Trump, is also a tool, even if the artwork is fake. It has no other purpose besides providing status. When he showed off his fake Renoir, Trump pointed at the supposed Renoir signature, not the immaculate brushstrokes. Plus, it implies an easily convertible liquid asset, unlike his real estate.
MY LIE
I have a confession.
I told you that we were here to solve an Art Mystery, but, really, it isn’t much of a mystery. The writer for The Federalist is provably wrong. The Trump La Loge is 100% beyond-a-reasonable-doubt fake. The “who” and the “what” are much less interesting, you see, than the “why.” And that’s why I brought you here. To help me solve the “why.”
THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF LIES
In an earlier story about the Vermeer forgeries, we looked at research into how people allowed themselves to be deceived. Here, we are going to work from the other side of deception. We are going to study the mind of a liar.
You may not believe it right now, but when it comes to Trump, the lying might not be so much nature, and it might not be so much nurture, but the physical generation of actual human tissue that helps him to lie. Talk about a tissue of lies!
I believe that Donald Trump’s body has adapted itself to tell lies.
If you are skeptical, then, well, good for you! That is a healthy response to a claim so outlandish. But let me get to the evidence and the scientific studies before you make up your mind. Then, we can discuss it in the comments.
WHY YOU ALWAYS LYING?
In reviewing the scientific literature, it seems that telling a falsehood, even on a daily basis, is commonplace, and it is actually an anticipated developmental milestone in children. To lie is human. The thing is, most people don’t lie maliciously or bigly or oftenly.
A Duke professor ran an experiment to find out how much normal people are likely to lie. He eventually amassed a large group of test subjects who were asked to solve math problems within a certain amount of time. When they finished, they would be asked how many they had solved and get payment for the number of problems completed. Without looking at it, the scratch paper used by the test subjects to arrive at solutions was put into a paper shredder.
It wasn’t a shredder.
It made shredding noises, but didn’t shred the important bits of paper. He was able to see how many problems they actually solved and compare it to the number the students had claimed. Usually, the student had finished about four problems but requested payment for six. Seventy percent of the 40,000 people tested lied. Yet, of the 40,000 people tested, only twenty claimed real whoppers, saying that they had solved all of the math problems. So, generally, the students would lie, but only a little.
This conclusion was supported by another experiment the professor conducted. This trial involved the use of a vending machine:
The machine was set up to say that bags of candy cost 75 cents on the outside, but its mechanism on the inside was set to zero cents. So when people put money in the vending machine, they would get extra bags of candy, and all of their money back. A big sign on the vending machine read, “If there’s something wrong with this machine, please call this number”— in this instance, [the professor’s] cell phone number. Nobody called, but nobody took more than four bags of candy.
CHANGES IN THE BRAIN
Other studies have looked at the brain using imaging devices. These help Scientists understand the physical nature of lying. In the section above, we saw that only about .05% of the population (20 people out of 40,000) are likely to be big liars. How did they achieve that status?
P
sychologist Tali Sharot of University College London set up another clever trap to induce fraud from unsuspecting test subjects. The difference with this test was that the Scientists were able to peer into the brains of the cheaters:
Twenty-five of the volunteers also underwent neuroimaging via fMRI…. The amygdala, a brain structure that responds to and processes unpleasant emotional experiences, erupted with activity after the first self-serving lie. That fits with the idea that lying is aversive: People like to think they’re good, and as children most people absorb the message that lying is immoral. “At first we do it only a little so our perception of ourselves doesn’t suffer,” Sharot said.
But amygdala activity decreased before each subsequent lie. The sharper the decrease, the greater a volunteer’s lie in the next round. That suggested the decrease in amygdala activity was easing people’s slide down a slippery slope.
Lying, it seems, becomes easier and less painful with experience. Do you think that Trump would show any amygdala response after one of his latest lies? And that may also have something to do with our next experiment.
A 2005 study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry may contain the answers we are seeking. The researchers expected to find that the brains of liars were deficient in some respect. What they found, instead, was surplus brain matter.
They selected groups of people from three categories: compulsive liars, antisocial types who didn’t lie as much, and others with no history of compulsive lying or other antisocial behavior. Then, they put all of them (one at a time) through
a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and took pictures of their prefrontal cortex. They chose to focus on this area of the brain because previous studies had shown that the prefrontal cortex plays a role in both lying and in antisocial behaviors.
If you could look into this part of the brain, which sits right behind your forehead, you would see two kinds of matter: gray and white. Gray matter is the groups of brain cells that process information. Most neuroscience studies focus on gray matter. But nearly half the brain is composed of connective tissues that carry electrical signals from one group of neurons to another. This is white matter. Roughly, gray matter is where the processing happens, and white matter connects different parts of the brain, helping us to bring different ideas together.
The liars in Yang's study had on average 22 percent to 26 percent more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than both the normal and antisocial controls.
The researchers postulate that people with that much white matter are able to make more connections—and quicker connections—than the rest of us. Connections like, “because I am Trump” that was the “largest inauguration crowd ever.”
MY THEORY
I believe that Donald Trump has biologically transformed himself into the world’s most prolific liar. Sure he had the very best narcissism and insecurities to begin with, but like an Olympic sprinter doing squats and leg presses, he has mutated his own biology to perform at peak efficiency.
His amygdala response has withered away, while the white matter, the connective tissue in his prefrontal cortex, has grown to astounding proportions. The greatest growth occurred before the age of 25, but it has continued. There is actual science behind the old adage: Practice makes perfect.
This is just a theory, and I am not a doctor.
Moreover, there is no single explanation for a person who would prefer to lie. This theory, though, explains how Trump began to lie like any normal person, but, for him, it snowballed over time until now the very physiology of his body facilitates his falsehoods.
It also doesn’t hurt that all of his heroes, his father, Hitler, Putin—basically any dictator—resorted to either sales “puffery” or propaganda, which is state-sponsored lying. There are certainly many factors at play, but Trump’s physical morphology, compared to you or me, seems to be implicated.
Finally, there have been limited repercussions for his lying.
A DISTURBING POSSIBLE CONCLUSION
In this story you have seen absolute proof—exclusive to Daily Kos—that the second Trump Renoir is a fake. You will not find that anywhere else on the internet. But that is actually small potatoes compared to the Science behind that lie and Trump’s many other, more consequential, lies. The media waited more than a year for Donald Trump to make a presidential “pivot.” It never occurred, and we know, at least in part, why.
The war on truth involves more than just the big lies; it also includes the stupid little ones. Moreover, it is a two-front war. Not only are we inundated with lies, but the means to detect them are being hindered or removed, from home-schooling to the conservative media to the denigration of higher education to bot farms, there exists an assault on our ability to determine the truth.
Like many of you, I enjoy Science Fiction. In the future, we were supposed to get the jet packs, the meal in a tiny capsule and the larger brains, until one day—a glorious day—we would evolve into beings of pure energy. Or so the story goes. But, what if, instead, our evolution took us down the path of larger brains, purpose-built for lying? Is that where we want to go? In that world, truth would not be beauty, and beauty would not be truth.